Sir George Clausen

The Times Friday November 4, 1944

Death Notice

CLAUSEN :- On November 22, 1944, at Cold Ash, Newbury, Sir George Clausen, RA., aged 92. Funeral private. Memorial Service at St Martin-in-the-Fields at 2.30 p m on Friday December 1.

Sir George Clausen RA, RWS died yesterday at Cold Ash near Newbury at the house of his son-in-law Mr Thomas Derrick.

Obituary

George Clausen was born in London in 1852. His father of Danish extraction was a decorative artist, and the boy at eighteen became a draught

sman in a builders office. Thence he passed to the National School of Art (now the Royal College of Art) at South Kensington, and a few pages of “Recollections” which he published forty year later gave an interesting picture of the art education of those days. The technical training was good, but limited. Leighton and Millais were the models to be chiefly admired, but young Clausen and a few more were aware of Whistler, whom they saw in Chelsea, but never dared address. It is curious to read that for a time Clausen worked in the studio of Edwin Long, and in Paris in that of Bouguereau, artists with whom his work had nothing in common. By Millet, Corot, Degas, and Manet, however, Clausen was permanently influenced. This was evident in the pictures which he began to exhibit at Burlington House, in the late 70s; pictures of country life and landscape which impressed not only the public, but the senior artists with their sincerity, and keenness of observation, and their grasp of life and movement. He did good work in the Academy schools, where he was formerly Professor of Painting, and published in 1906 as “Six Lectures on Painting,” the sound and interesting discourses which he had delivered to students. Then he brought out “Aims and Ideals in Art,” a book in which he showed a remarkably sympathetic understanding of the as yet confused aims of the younger generation.

Clausen’s best paintings were always the fruit of a profound study of country life, of landscapes in sun and shade, of flowers, of work on the farm. His most remarkable characteristic was his power of growth. No other painter of his age responded so freely to the spirit of the times - and that without injury to the strongly personal character of his work. His later developments may be described as starting with the careful naturalism of “The Girl at the Gate,” purchased by the Chantrey Bequest in 1890 and now in the Tate Gallery, in a decorative and atmospheric direction, Working mostly in Essex, but also making use of his immediate surroundings in St John’s Wood, he was more concerned with conditions of light, a favourite of his being the prismatic play of colour when objects are seen against the sun. Clausen, however, differed from the French Impressionists by retaining integrity of form. Nobody excelled him in the capacity to suggest bulk and solidity in conditions when the actual features of landscapes were almost obliterated. Of his landscapes in this manner “The Gleaners Returning” in the Academy of 1898, was also bought by the Chantrey Bequest.

Barn interiors, paintings of the nude, and still life compositions were other characteristic subjects; and in all his work Clausen showed a poetical appreciation akin to that of Thomas Hardy, but without the abiding sense of tragedy of the relation of man to nature. His portraits were distinguished by a peculiar gravity, and include the self-portrait in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. It was in his water-colours, contributed to the exhibitions of the Royal Water-Colour Society, of which he became a member in 1898, and at which he continued to exhibit until quite recently, that he showed his extraordinary youthfulness of mind. Bold in design, and swift and summary in execution, a collection of them at the Grosvenor Gallery about twenty years ago, suggested less the work of one already a veteran, than that of a young man in the full vigour of his powers. Clausen had a scholarly understanding of the special problems of mural decoration, and also turned his attention to posters, being one of the most successful Academicians invited by the LMS in 1927 to contribute designs. Adaptability was, indeed, one of his most prominent characteristics. His enlightened sympathy with “modernism” in art was generally recognized, and when the Academy began to open its doors to work of a more experimental kind, it generally fell to Clausen to arrange the contents of Gallery 1X, reserved for the less orthodox contributions..

Clausen, who became an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1895, and an Academician in 1906, was knighted in 1927. In 1881 he married Agnes, the daughter of George Webster of Kings Lynn. She died in March this year. He is survived by three sons and a daughter. Another daughter, Katherine, who was an accomplished painter, died some years ago.